The Texas-Chihuahua-New Mexico Regional Economic Competitiveness Forum is being organized by the Border Legislative Conference, a binational mechanism of cooperation among legislators of the 10 U.S. – Mexico border states, along with the Office of Congressman Beto O’Rourke and with the support of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute.

In it, we will have the opportunity to discuss the main issues and challenges, about the Mexico-U.S. Border. Among the attendees there will be U.S. Congressmen as Joaquin Castro, Henry Cuellar, Bill Owens, and Steve Pearce. Additionaly, there will be public servants from both sides of the border such as Oscar Leeser, Mayor of El Paso; Enrique Serrano, Mayor of Ciudad Juárez, among many others.

Elsy Nuñez, a Honduran national who had once resided in the United States, tried three separate times since Aug. 23 to convince immigration authorities in Laredo, Texas, to allow her into the country. She brought documentation detailing the multiple health health problems her 4-year-old, U.S.-born daughter Valeria suffers, including cerebral palsy and a ruptured eardrum. Three times, border officials turned her away. On Monday night, she finally got her wish.

Nuñez’s luck changed when she joined a group of activists staging the second round of a protest action against deportations that is thought to be unprecedented. Originally branding themselves as the “Dream 30,” a group of people who had spent part of their lives in the United States as undocumented immigrants crossed the border from Mexico at the legal port of entry in Laredo on Monday and asked for humanitarian parole. If that request is rejected, they plan to apply for asylum.

In one of his first post-election interviews, President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto said that he will work to restore security along the border through more collaboration with the U.S., strengthen trade, and lobby to help the 6 million Mexican illegal immigrants in the U.S. gain legal status.

Although he wants greater cooperation with the U.S. in Mexico, Peña Nieto stopped short of advocating for armed U.S. agents or troops on the ground there, saying that such talk among Mexicans is a reflection of growing exasperation with the current government’s inability to bring down the violence. More than 55,000 people have been killed during the six years of the administration of Felipe Calderón.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon accused the United States on Thursday of dumping criminals at the border because it is cheaper than prosecuting them, and said the practice has fueled violence in Mexico’s border areas.

U.S. officials earlier this week reported a record number of deportations in fiscal year 2011, and said the number of deportees with criminal convictions had nearly doubled since 2008.

“There are many factors in the violence that is being experienced in some Mexican border cities, but one of those is that the American authorities have gotten into the habit of simply deporting 60 (thousand) or 70,000 migrants per year to cities like Ciudad Juarez or Tijuana,” Calderon told an immigration conference.

TIJUANA, Mexico — After 15 years of installing marble in homes in Escondido, California, Porfirio Perez was caught without a driver’s license during a February traffic stop and deported.

Now the 42-year-old just tries to survive in this sprawling industrial border city, 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from his birthplace of Puebla in central Mexico.

He is among hundreds of deportees who are stuck in Tijuana, which sits across from San Diego, California, because they don’t have the Mexican documents required and need permanent addresses to get them. He and about 350 others live in and around the Rio Tijuana canal that separates the two cities.

The Border Trade Alliance recommends president-elect Barack Obama invest in border infrastructure to eliminate the bottlenecks that negatively affect trade in the region.The organization, dedicated to promoting economic exchange between Mexico, the United States and Canada, sent its policy recommendations for sustaining the border economy to the president-elect this week.